“BE YOUR OWN MASTER!” says the Vedanta Society sign.
Why not?…In the park
Some clouds roll over me like Greenland on a map.
If I wanted to I could imagine I was flying over
The Greenland coast and gazing down at the white fjords.
Instead I’m lying on the grass, listening to city sounds.
They come to me in three-dimensional form,
Like a loaf of Wonder Bread. Baby carriages squeak
Near the middle. Cars humming through Central Park,
Somewhere near the back of the loaf.
What sound would be the end-piece, the round brown sliver?
The unzipping of airline bags.
Or a glove thwacked
By a rookie pitcher who falls apart
In the eighth inning. The manager takes the ball silently,
Like a man who has eaten a full loaf of bread
And has a stomach pain. Don’t glamorize silence.
There is nothing profound about quiet, it is usually
Only the universe holding its stomach.
Delmore Schwartz must have been a great talker.
They say he put most of his talent into his life
But I don’t know, I think his prose is pretty great;
He made a better storywriter than a poet.
I could write a thousand-page biography
Propounding that stance, and interview all the old rummy
Critics who are powerful now;
They would let their hair down about Delmore,
And the final crackup.
The reason I’m thinking of Delmore Schwartz is that
He wrote a poem about city parks. And it wasn’t that successful,
It went on for about twelve pages, but I admired him
For writing a poem with so little point,
And so much prosy description. I think he was trying to
Eulogize normal middle-class happiness on a Sunday afternoon,
And how he felt out of it. But that wouldn’t have
Taken twelve pages…He was probably being ironic
About the people’s happiness, and secretly thought
They weren’t happy. He wrote it about the same time
Robert Moses was carving out his parks empire
By forcing the Long Island millionaires to give up their privacy
So that the middle class could get to the beach.
Of course it was also supposed to benefit
The poor slum-dwellers, but how many of them
Ever made it to Sunken Meadows?
Or Jones Beach?
What’s strange about parks—innocent greenery—
Is that no one ever suspected them to ruin New York.
Yet what finally gutted the city were the parkways
Moses built, slashed through all five boroughs
Quiet lower-middle-class neighborhoods bulldozed
For cars to get to the picnic grounds faster,
Or the Hamptons—
A life of paperwork capped by a summer home.
But I can’t blame them: I’d like a summer home myself!
I don’t really believe New York is dying, no more than
The universe is dying. I have no stake in seeing
This poem end pessimistically.
I’d like to leave people with a good feeling.
Robert Moses, Delmore Schwartz.
Two ambitious Jews, like myself.
They tried to be their own masters…
It’s hard to imagine New York going under
On a slow summer day like today
Without even a loud noise to mark it
Like the Empire State Building keeling over
And everyone running to the scene of default.
The helicopters will be standing by,
Ready to take us to Greenland.
A special airlift for poetic men of letters,
A jumbo Boeing crammed to the teeth,
And you can’t get in if your name isn’t
Listed in Poets and Writers Directory.
“So long, New York School of Poets!”
I’ll stay behind, tending the weeds
And sleeping in deserted Central Park.
Soon I’ll be hearing about the Godthaab School:
Their seemingly infinite talent for “chatty brilliance,"
Buddhism, and marathon readings.
I’ll shake my head and sigh: What are
Anne and Michael doing now?
How was this year’s big Halloween party,
Or do they even celebrate Halloween in Greenland?
Maybe they’re into solstice holidays, like Midsummer Night.
from: At the End of the Day: Selected Poems and an Introductory Essay. Copyright 2009.
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